Welcome to The Ministry Lab's curated list of resources to help congregational leaders encourage congregational engagement in the work of environmental sustainability. Here you'll find opportunities for:
If you don't find a resource to fit your need, don't hesitate to consult with The Ministry Lab's director, Rev. Emily Meyer, who is happy to assist you.
Creation Care | One Home One Future
You can answer the call to strengthen your congregation and care for creation in ways that are inspiring, fulfilling, and accessible. Join One Home One Future, a multi-faith campaign to strengthen vitality, relevance, and community connection across generations in local congregations nationwide. Be part of a visible effort to invite creation care and climate action, no matter if you are just getting started or already engaging.
Waadookawaad Amikwag, which translates from Ojibwe into English as, "Those Who Help Beaver", is a group of determined and innovative Water Protectors who are making a difference! They are Indigenous Leaders, Professional Drone Pilots, and Certified Water Tester, Citizens Scientists, working in conjunction with environmental organizations, and their community members to protect clean water and manoomin (aka, wild rice). They are on the frontline gathering footage, data, and evidence of environmental damage and crimes. Then we investigate and finally advocate to state & federal agencies about the impacts to our wetlands and waterways.
Become a citizen/community scientist and support their work!
776 Foundation is a newer organization dedicated to financial and leadership support for marginalized individuals committed to climate action.
THIRD ACT — EXPERIENCED PEOPLE WORKING FOR A FAIR AND STABLE PLANET.
This! Is What We Did is driven by the following Mission Statement:
To help grow a movement strong enough to break the power of the fossil fuel industry and stimulate the effective, drastic action needed to spur climate justice and give future generations a chance for a decent life through
In particular, we see people 50 years and older as an untapped resource to fight climate change.
The All We Can Save Project is on a mission to embed climate truth, courage, and just solutions in education — and to make it exceedingly easy to use the All We Can Save anthology within classrooms and beyond.
Access their free, open educator resources, or watch a short video walkthrough here.
Explore their educator resources →
Question Bank: Discussion questions for essays and poems
With the classroom in mind, our living question bank offers a rich variety of discussion questions, writing prompts, and activity ideas tailored to specific sections, essays, and poems in the anthology.
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These assignments explore a core theme from All We Can Save: using your voice. They’re designed to build students’ skills in climate communication, specifically op-eds and TED-style talks.
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These assignments build on another core theme from All We Can Save: taking climate action. They’re designed to help students translate what they’re learning into accessible, meaningful action in widening circles of influence.
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All We Can Save Circles discussion guides
All We Can Save Circles (our deep “book club” model) provide discussion guides for each section of the anthology. The full 10-session experience works well for the classroom, facilitated by an educator or by students themselves. You can also draw selectively on the “generous questions,” journal prompts, and supplementary read-watch-listen materials.
Tips on using Circles in the classroom
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To navigate the content of All We Can Save with ease, these summaries offer a high-level overview of each essay, as well as brief author bios, key terms introduced, and additional leaders highlighted in the piece.
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Additional read-watch-listen resources
If you’re looking to dig deeper into the work of contributors to the book, you can find a selection of resources at the bottom of each Circles session.
We’ve also curated a list of relevant TED talks that pair well with each section of All We Can Save (some featuring contributors to the anthology).
Creation Justice Ministries designed this resource to help leaders think through all of the ways plastic appears in our culture and to consider questions of how we can best love God, creation, and neighbor In a world overrun with waste and pollution. The resource contains an overview of the plastic crisis, a theological framing, sermon starters, advocacy ideas, and resources for children. Additionally, three original songs were commissioned to fit this year’s theme. The resource includes recordings as well as sheet music.
Download and share this resource as you prepare for Earth day and the days beyond as we turn our hearts away from things made with human hands and begin to fall in love with God’s earth!
Find books, curricula, prayer, music, and worship elements (including a full sermon), and community organizations and businesses grouped to help congregations take next steps in antiracism work, creation care, and addressing intergenerational mental health and well-being in the WaterThreads - Woven Together: Water, Community, Well-Being. Available online and via requested download for member congregations - who should email: ministrylab@unitedseminary.edu - for access.
Creation care resources for you and your church
Recognizing the urgent need to address the intertwined crises of climate and inequality, the United Church of Christ Council for Climate Justice calls people of faith and their churches to an all-out mobilization of their gifts and resources. Here are 10 ways to respond.
This project walks with congregations as they learn about the realities of climate change, as they seek to be better stewards of the resources they have been given, and as they find their voice to speak to their public officials about common sense climate policy that will benefit the earth, people around the world who are poor and vulnerable, and future generations. Led by the Christian Reformed Church in North America, more than 20 denominations are represented.
Lutherans Restoring Creation is a grassroots group of advocates for climate justice in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Their website includes stories and ideas for advocacy, personal discipleship, and creation care for churches.
This ecumenical organization offers a variety of resources and ways you can put your faith into action for a safer climate. Check out their Cool Congregations program for churches using solar energy as well as their resources for worship and education.
Each year, Creation Justice Ministries publishes a compilation of liturgies, action ideas, Bible studies, informational articles, and more to mark Earth Day and/or Earth Day Sunday. Committed to “justice for God’s planet and people,” this organization has many opportunities for stewardship and action.
The UCC, UUA, EESI, and Interfaith Power & Light created this video, shared by Lutherans Restoring Creation, outlining congregations' access: Federal Funding Resources for Nonprofit and Houses of Worship Briefing.
Share your stories and connect with other congregations engaged with creation care via Lutherans Restoring Creation's interactive Map of Care for Creation Ministries. Learn about it, contribute to it, and find other exciting ideas here.
10 Films to Inspire Your Inner Environmental Superhero by Leigh Fine
Movies have long helped us understand what it means to live on earth and contribute to an ecologically sustainable planet. Here are ten of our favorites.
Still from FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992).
WATER WHERE WE LIVE CURRICULUM
This curriculum was created by Growing Green Hearts/Heidi Ferris, in conjunction with the Capitol Region Watershed District, area congregations, Luther Seminary, and The Ministry Lab.
Study & Worship for Progressive Churches: Creation (Donald Schmidt - Author). This all-in-one study and worship resource includes everything a congregation needs to enable children, youth, parents, and grandparents to share together in a five-week study of the biblical stories of creation.
Lutherans Restoring Creation offer this Congregational Covenant and Organizing Kit
Adapt it to any denominational affiliation by substituting comparable denominational statements or calls to action in appropriate places. Tools for organizing across committee and governance structures are universal.
10 Films to Inspire Your Inner Environmental Superhero by Leigh Fine
Movies have long helped us understand what it means to live on earth and contribute to an ecologically sustainable planet. Here are ten of our favorites.
Still from FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992).
Reconciling relationships with nature: In a video released by United Methodist Global Ministries, Rev. Tyler Sit, an EarthKeeper who serves New City Church in Minneapolis, shares the importance of connecting with the Earth and how leading a program that provides nature-based therapy in support of people of color is impacting his community. Watch video
The Office of Social Justice and Faith Formation Ministries offer this resource to address God's call to care for creation. Ten Ways to Care for Creation includes ideas such as starting an intergenerational gardening project, holding a storytelling series, and much more!
Download this free resource or order printed copies for a small fee at FaithAliveResources.org.
a suite of Grades 3-12 curriculum resources
Here’s a How-To, for becoming a Creation-Care Congregation:
Lutherans Restoring Creation offers two resources to support communities in becoming Creation Care Congregations:
Becoming a Creation-Care Congregation: A Self-Organizing Kit with Guideline and Resources guides congregations through an 'evolution' of creation care actions.
Their Covenant with Creation page provides links to forms of Affirmation and Action congregations can engage together toward a more sustainable planet.
Blessed Tomorrow Ambassadors Training - Blessed Tomorrow
Moving Forward: A Guide to Climate Action For Your Congregation and Community that will provide people of faith with the ideas and resources to act.
At White Earth Tribal and Community College, in Mahnomen, a paid solar-worker certification program is preparing students of all ages to install solar arrays. Across the reservation in Osage, 8th Fire Solar is constructing solar thermal panels—basically a sun-powered furnace system—that help people cut emissions and lower winter heating bills.
Global Ministries EarthKeepers is a training program that equips US-based United Methodists to launch and grow environmental projects in their communities. Topics include eco-theology, anti-racism, community organizing, and project planning. All participants plan a project during the training. Find out more and apply.
ecoAmerica expands climate leadership beyond traditional environmental circles. They are building a diverse network of major institutions and thought leaders in five sectors — faith, health, communities, higher education, and business — who have the power to inspire tens of millions of Americans on climate change, in counties and communities nationwide including the heartland. Watch this video to learn more about their programs and hear leaders speak.
Farmer-Eater Exchange: avoid food waste;
Community Supported Agriculture directory: openings for this season.
How to Find Joy in Climate Action - Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson's TED Talk
We can all play a role in the climate movement by tapping into our skills, resources and networks in ways that bring us satisfaction, says climate leader Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She suggests drawing a Venn diagram to map these questions: What are you good at? What is the work that needs doing? And what brings you joy? Where your answers intersect is where you should put your climate action effort. "Averting climate catastrophe: this is the work of our lifetimes," Johnson says.
Talking Climate with Katharine Hayhoe features:
Katharine Hayhoe is author of Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
Creation Justice Ministries designed this resource to help leaders think through all of the ways plastic appears in our culture and to consider questions of how we can best love God, creation, and neighbor In a world overrun with waste and pollution. The resource contains an overview of the plastic crisis, a theological framing, sermon starters, advocacy ideas, and resources for children. Additionally, three original songs were commissioned to fit this year’s theme. The resource includes recordings as well as sheet music.
Download and share this resource as you prepare for Earth day and the days beyond as we turn our hearts away from things made with human hands and begin to fall in love with God’s earth!
Download the February 2024 52 Ways to Care for Creation bulletin insert! Use this resource to deepen your congregation’s commitment to creation justice. Each week highlights a creation justice idea for action or reflection for yourself and your community. Every month, we will include a bulletin insert for you to print and share with your church. You can also find bulletin inserts for the full year here.
Finding Climate Solutions in Fairy Tales
What can stories of witches tell us about solving the plastics problem?
BY KATHERINE ELLSWORTH-KREBS &
BECKY TIPPER
YES! Magazine
What if Legal Personhood Included Plants, Rivers, and the Planet?
Amy Westervelt, Founder of the Critical Frequency podcast network.
PHOTO BY ISABELLA REYES-KLEIN
A new podcast explores the rights of nature movement and its potential to shift Western legal doctrine around environmental protection.
How Europe's Right to Repair Reduces Waste by Klaus Sieg
Reparations, debt cancellation, and climate justice are all regular features in climate solutions—but what do they mean in practice?
Yes! Magazine; By Anita Bhadani
The podcast explores the rights of nature movement and its potential to shift Western legal doctrine around environmental protection.
Are you hungry for deeper dialogue about the climate crisis and building community around solutions? So are the women of All We Can Save. That’s why they created All We Can Save Circles — like a book club, but a cooler, deeper, extended version. Strengthen the “we” in All We Can Save. Circles were created by Dr. Katharine Wilkinson.
AND: Access free, open facilitation guides for each session:
Solar for Your House! Solar United Neighbors Opens 2024 Solar Buyers’ Group
For the third year in a row, MNIPL is partnering with Solar United Neighbors (SUN) to help homeowners get great pricing and free assistance to go solar. Joining the SUN “Co-op” is free and gives access to expert information on residential solar and battery storage. Solar installers compete in a bid process to be the Solar Co-op’s preferred installer, resulting in lower costs for members. It's also no-pressure: members receive a design for their property, but they're free to go forward or not with the project. SUN will also help identify which tax credits and local and utility incentives are available.
Click here to learn about and join the Twin Cities Solar United Neighbors Solar Co-op!
Click here to learn about and join the Duluth & Arrowhead Solar Co-op here!
Water Legacy: Protecting Minnesota’s Life-Giving Waters
Protecting Minnesota’s waters and communities that rely on them, particularly from the proposed PolyMet/Glencore sulfide mine and attempted water quality standard rollbacks.
MNIPL helps congregations go solar. See the ways your building can become more energy sustainable and a cost-effective agent in being good stewards of creation. Learn more here.
Find out how individuals and communities can live into their responsibilities as Treaty Peoples to support the years-long efforts of Water Protectors to Stop Line 3.
Nuns & Nones: Together with religious communities and movement partners, we create new land transitions rooted in ecological and racial healing.
offers diverse and changing opportunities to engage in the work of climate care and natural disaster relief locally, nationally and globally.
The MN Center for Environmental Advocacy offers numerous opportunities to engage - both long-range (like their Youth Climate Intervenors) and extremely current Action Alerts. See here for more options.
Visit the Wakan Tipi Center, part of the Lower Phalen Creek Project.
Develop your own excursion or work with Heidi@growinggreenhearts.com.
Interfaith Power & Light offers a themed organizer’s kit for Faith Climate Action Week every year to support your efforts around Earth Day to engage your congregation in caring for Creation.
Hear Matthew Fox in conversation with Alex and Allyson Grey, of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, on "Easter, Christ, and Creation Spirituality."
